‘Romantic Outlaws,’ About the Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

ByCRISTINA NEHRING MAY 8, 2015 The New York Times

A literary legacy: Mary Shelley, left, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.CreditLeft: Richard Rothwell/National Portrait Gallery, London; right: John Opie/National Portrait Gallery, London

They had it all. When they eloped, 16-year-old Mary Godwin and 21-year-old Percy Shelley had everything artists could desire: genius, beauty, literary pedigree, aristocratic inheritance, Mediterranean villas, famous friends, fearless admirers, freedom and — above all — faith in free love.

Yet by the time Percy drowned on a pleasure boat in 1822 at the age of 29, the poet had, for some time, been stashing cyanide and laudanum in the Italian mansion where he was vacationing with his wife, his mistress, his adoring sister-in-law and other hangers-on. He knew laudanum intimately: His famous mother-in-law, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, had nearly ended her life with it. His wife’s half sister had, in fact, ended her life with it. Now Percy himself was stocking up. Did he shipwreck himself on his boat deliberately? There were rumors he had declined the help of an Italian vessel as he capsized, but we will never know.

There is a great deal we can’t know about the social experimenters who crowd Charlotte Gordon’s new tome of almost 650 pages, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley.” Gordon’s goal in this biography, her third work of history, is to tack back and forth between the literary love lives of both women in order to show that Mary Shelley was “steeped . . . in her mother’s ideas” and that the two were temperamental twins, even if their existences hardly overlapped.

Wollstonecraft, best known for radical social argument and fiery feminist polemics like “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” died 11 days after giving birth to Mary Godwin, who as Mary Shelley is best known as the author of “Frankenstein,” written to entertain fellow holiday makers on Lake Geneva. Gordon’s conceit of alternating chapters between Mary W. and Mary S. sets her biography apart from the vast existing literature on the two, but it ultimately makes for a confusing and disjointed narrative. As we flip between the Marys, the chronology gets muddled. Characters’ deaths are recounted before their births. Moreover, Gordon seems minimally interested in her subjects’ writings. In this book about their lives, however, she misses that mother and child were nearly opposites.

Granted, both were writers skeptical of traditional matrimony, but Wollstonecraft was a rowdy, noisy, ever-impoverished and always intrepid polemicist who came late (and hard) to love. She was a virgin until her early 30s, had her first child in her mid-30s and her first marriage five months before she died, at 38. Between those years she suffered, seduced, robustly challenged her lovers, ardently protected her progeny, got her feet bloody reporting on the French Revolution, and composed some of the most passionate and painful love letters ever exposed to the public eye. (Gordon, alas, quotes few.) Her marriage to a fellow philosopher, William Godwin, was amorous and idealistic as well as unconventional: The two maintained separate circles of friends and separate study quarters between which they passed love notes. Mary famously told him, “I wish you, for my soul, to be riveted in my heart; but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow.”

Mary Godwin was half her mother’s “first kiss” age when Percy Shelley, then still married to a different teenage girl, whisked her from her home and impregnated her. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley spoke quietly, wrote decorously, deferred to her man and often appeared feelingless. She is quoted, in Daisy Hay’s excellent 2010 biography, “Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation,” as upbraiding herself for thinking about her deceased daughter days after her death, when no book was around to “divert” her: “This is foolish,” she wrote in her journal. Onlookers exclaimed at her apparent coldness after Percy drowned. But perhaps such coldness was Mary Shelley’s way to survive radical domestic experiments.

After all, we do know a number of things about England’s young Romantics. We know that by the time 24-year-old Mary Shelley learned of her husband’s shipwreck, she was already alienated from him. As Gordon points out, they were sleeping apart in their Italian villa, and Mary silently blamed Percy’s narcissism for the deaths of at least two of their three deceased children from illnesses during their adventures through Europe.

The death and abandonment of children was a regular motif in the “league of incest” (as the Shelleys’ traveling band of poetic friends became known). In 1820, news arrived of the demise of a baby named Elena — possibly his daughter with an Englishwoman in Italy. A few months before Percy’s drowning, news came of the death of 5-year-old Allegra, the child of Mary Shelley’s stepsister and traveling companion, Claire, with Lord Byron. By this point, Gordon suggests, Claire may already have miscarried Percy’s baby. Claire had competed for her stepsister’s beau from the start of their European peregrinations, but she soon retired to a remote “rural retreat” for some months — perhaps to give birth to his child and avoid more scandal than Mary’s elopement with the married poet had already caused.

The adult body count was also steep. It included 22-year-old Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s first daughter. The emotionally fragile Fanny had difficulty abiding the loneliness and rejection occasioned by Mary and Claire’s escape; when Percy Shelley found her poisoned body in a hotel room, all he did was scratch Fanny’s signature off her suicide note. Two months later, in December 1816, his own despairing first wife — pregnant with his second child and caring for his first when he eloped with Mary — threw herself to her death into the River Thames. Percy, the espouser of free love, accused his abandoned wife of immorality after her suicide, arguing that he, not her parents, should claim the motherless toddlers he had ignored thus far. The 19th-century court dismissed his demand.

Gordon salutes her subjects because they “asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end,” but she remains poker-faced about the wreckage she describes. Since she is considering the lives more than the works of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, the absence of any reckoning with those lives can leave one dissatisfied. Mary Shelley considered herself an idealist, as had Wollstonecraft before her. But where Shelley was wrapped around her husband’s finger and whitewashed their “revolutionary” pretensions after his death, Wollstonecraft remained her own woman. Gordon’s back-and-forth style ultimately fails to do justice to Wollstonecraft’s at once bolder and tenderer life: the mother’s singular profile recedes behind the daughter’s crowded canvas.

Creating a positive social revolution is not for the fainthearted — but neither is it for the coldhearted. The Shelley domestic experiment may have failed disastrously, but then traditional domestic relations enfeeble, incarcerate and injure us regularly as well. The point — which we can glean from Gordon’s biography, though she does not make it herself — is not simply to swagger with revolutionary zeal but to hold ourselves to a kinder, gentler, higher standard. In private and public life, revolutionaries aren’t saints; those who depose rusty crowns should take care to replace them with jewels, not thorns.

ROMANTIC OUTLAWS

The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

By Charlotte Gordon

Illustrated. 649 pp. Random House. $30.